I/II. http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2017/09/no-we-cannot-shoot-down-north-koreas-missiles/141070/
No, We Cannot Shoot Down North Korea’s Missiles In a test, SM-6 missiles fired from the guided-missile destroyer USS John Paul Jones (DDG 53) hit a target medium-range ballistic missile off Hawaii, Au. 29, 2017. BY JOE CIRINCIONE READ BIO SEPTEMBER 17, 2017 PHOTO BY LATONJA MARTIN Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email this article It's time national leaders speak realistically about missile defense. The number one reason we don’t shoot down North Korea’s missiles is that we cannot. Officials like to reassure their publics about our defense to these missiles. Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told his nation after last week’s test, “We didn’t intercept it because no damage to Japanese territory was expected.” That is half true. The missile did not pose a serious threat. It flew over the Japanese island of Hokkaido, landing 3700 km (2300 miles) from its launch point near North Korea’s capital of Pyongyang. The key word here is “over.” Like way over. Like 770 kilometers (475 miles) over Japan at the apogee of its flight path. Neither Japan nor the United States could have intercepted the missile. None of the theater ballistic missile defense weapons in existence can reach that high. It is hundreds of kilometers too high for the Aegis interceptors deployed on Navy ships off Japan. Even higher for the THAAD systems in South Korea and Guam. Way too high for the Patriot systems in Japan, which engage largely within the atmosphere. All of these are basically designed to hit a missile in the post-mid-course or terminal phase, when it is on its way down, coming more or less straight at the defending system. Patriot is meant to protect relatively small areas such as ports or air bases; THAAD defends a larger area; the advanced Aegis system theoretically could defend thousands of square kilometers. But could we intercept before the missile climbed that high? There is almost no chance of hitting a North Korean missile on its way up unless an Aegis ship was deployed very close to the launch point, perhaps in North Korean waters. Even then, it would have to chase the missile, a race it is unlikely to win. In the only one or two minutes of warning time any system would have, the probability of a successful engagement drops close to zero. “When over Japan, they are too high to reach,” tweeted astronomer Jonathan McDowell, in between tracking the end of the Cassini mission. “You’d have to put the Aegis right off NK coast to have a chance.” “It’s actually virtually impossible to shoot down a missile on the way up,” adds Gerry Doyle, deputy business editor for Asia at The New York Times. “Midcourse or terminal are the only places you have a shot.” That would mean for a test missile shot towards Guam, THAAD would have a chance to engage, though it has only been tested once against a missile of this range. For the test flights over Japan that would mean the only engagements possible are to the east of Japan, when the missile was on its way down. But there is little reason and huge logistical difficulties in having U.S. Aegis destroyers and cruisers loiter in the ocean there, waiting for a possible test launch. Related: Why Didn’t the US Shoot Down That North Korean Missile? Related: The Technology Race to Build — or Stop — North Korea’s Nuclear Missiles Trying to use missiles from Aegis ships “would be a highly demanding task and entail a significant amount of guesswork, as the ships would have to be in the right place at the right time to stop a test at sea,” explains Kingston Reif of the Arms Control Association. And that is if the systems worked as advertised. None of the theater systems have been tested under the stressful conditions of a real-world exchange. THAAD, Patriot and especially Aegis, have done fairly well in tests, but these have been tests designed for success, simplified, carefully staged and using mostly short-range targets. Aegis has only been tested once against an intermediate-range target says Reif, one of the leading experts on U.S. missile defense programs. What about our long-range defenses, the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense, or GMD, interceptors based in Alaska and California? There the test record is even worse. Even under ideal conditions, where the defenders knew the time, direction and trajectory of the test target and all the details of its shape, temperature, etc., this system has only hit its target half of the time. “The success rate of the GMD systems in flight intercept tests has been dismal,” says former director of operational testing for the Pentagon, Philip Coyle. Our chances of intercepting a threat missile, even under ideal conditions, are basically “as good as a coin toss,” admits the former head of the Missile Defense Agency, retired Lt. Gen. Trey Obering. Yet, reporters routinely use words like “shield” and “dome” to describe our supposed capability, giving us a false sense of security. Officials make the matter worse with exaggerated, if carefully constructed, claims. “The United States military can defend against a limited North Korea attack on Seoul, Japan and the United States,” said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Joseph Dunford at the annual Aspen Security Forum in July. Is this true? It depends what you mean by the word “limited.” If North Korea cooperated and shot their new intercontinental ballistic missile, the Hwasong-14, at the United States with adequate warning so that we could prepare, and if the warhead looked pretty much like we expect it to look, and if they only shot one, and if they did not try to spoof the defense with decoys that looked like the warhead, or block the defense with low-power jammers, or hide the warhead in a cloud of chaff, or blind the defense by attacking the vulnerable radars, then, maybe this is true. The United States might have a 50-50 chance of hitting such a missile. If we had time to fire four or five interceptors, then the odds could go up. But North Korea is unlikely to cooperate. It will do everything possible to suppress the defenses. The 1999 National Intelligence Estimate of the Ballistic Threat to the United States noted that any country capable of testing a long-range ballistic missile would “rely initially on readily available technology – including separating RVs [reentry vehicles], spin-stabilized RVs, RV reorientation, radar absorbing material, booster fragmentation, low-power jammers, chaff, and simple (balloon) decoys – to develop penetration aids and countermeasures.” Our anti-missile systems have never been realistically tested against any of these simple countermeasures. This is one reason that the Pentagon’s current director of operational testing is much more cautious in his assessments than missile defense program officials. “GMD has demonstrate a limited capability to defend the U.S. Homeland from small numbers of simple intermediate-range or intercontinental ballistic missile threats launched from North Korea or Iran,” he reports. Moreover, it is impossible, he says, to “quantitatively assess GMD performance due to lack of ground tests” and “the reliability and availability of the operational GBI’s [Ground-Based Interceptors] is low, and the MDA continues to discover new failure modes during testing.” Yet, we have spent $40 billion on the GMD system and over $320 billion on scores of missile defense systems over the past few decades. You have to wonder exactly what these tests are for: give the troops the protection they need or give the contractors the next program payment? There is no need to rely on the word of missile defense boosters, or, for that matter, trust the analysis of jaded missile defense critics. We could stop testing for success and begin testing for actual performance, with “red team – blue team” tests, for example, to simulate a determined foe. We could also order an objective scientific assessment. For example, the American Physical Society could conduct a thorough examination of the feasibility and capability of kinetic missile defense weapons, just as they did for directed-energy weapons in 1987. That study popped the balloon of false claims about these weapons, the original basis for the “Star Wars” program begun by the Reagan administration, concluding that it would be decades before we would know if such weapons were even feasible. North Korea’s ballistic missile threat is real. We need to know if our missile defenses are for real. Joe Cirincione is president of Ploughshares Fund and the author of Nuclear Nightmares: Securing the World Before It Is Too Late. FULL BIO II. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/sep/05/us-shoot-down-north-korea-missile-couldnt-wests-capability?CMP=share_btn_fb Why didn’t the US shoot down North Korea’s missile? Maybe it couldn’t Joshua Pollack Pyongyang’s claim that it has tested a hydrogen bomb that can be loaded on a ballistic missile raises questions about how good the west’s defence systems are A US SM-6 missile test off Hawaii. Photograph: Latonja Martin/EPA Tuesday 5 September 2017 14.06 BST Last modified on Tuesday 5 September 2017 17.37 BST Perhaps no aspect of national defence is as poorly understood as ballistic missile defence. After North Korea’s shot over Japan last week with an intermediate-range ballistic missile, many people wanted to know why it wasn’t shot down. The answers may be disappointing – but hopefully they will also be enlightening. Focus on missile defence capabilities will only increase after Pyongyang’s claims on Sunday that it had tested a hydrogen bomb that can be loaded on to an intercontinental ballistic missile. Mattis on North Korea: any threat to US will be met with 'massive military response' Read more The first and most fundamental issue to understand is that developing and operating ballistic missile defence, or BMD, is an extremely challenging undertaking. Some are better than others, but the resulting systems are inherently limited in their capabilities and roles. Perhaps the most attractive sort of defences simply do not exist today, and quite probably never will. So-called boost-phase systems are designed to stop ballistic missiles early in flight, while their engines are still firing and they are ascending into the upper atmosphere and beyond. At times, the US has contemplated a global network of boost-phase interceptors that would whirl around the planet in low-Earth orbit, but the complexity and the economics of the idea are forbidding. More recently, the US built a prototype “airborne laser” – a massive weapon built into a Boeing 747, designed to burn a hole through an ascending missile, destroying it early in flight. The programme was cancelled on grounds of cost, shortcomings in technology and lack of operational realism: the plane would have to linger dangerously close to enemy territory to have any shot at a missile, making it highly vulnerable to attack just before launch. Opponents could also simply avoid launches from coastal regions. Play VideoPlay Current Time 0:00 / Duration Time 4:11 Loaded: 0% Progress: 0% FullscreenMute Could North Korea trigger a nuclear war? A panel organised by the National Academy of Sciences has looked at other options, focusing on the mid-course phase, when missiles – or the “re-entry vehicles” that carry warheads in many types of missiles – are passing through space. The ensuing report was very critical of the existing mid-course system for US homeland defence, known as Ground-based Midcourse Defence, or GMD, which is based primarily in Alaska and is intended to stop attacks on North America and Hawaii from North Korea. The academy panel advocated the gradual replacement of GMD with a substantially new, upgraded system. Instead, Congress has continued to put resources into the incremental improvement of GMD, whose flight-tests cost hundreds of millions of dollars each and have worked only about half the time. Why is GMD such a basket-case? Partly because of the extraordinary ambition of the concept Why is GMD such a basket-case? Partly because of the extraordinary ambition of the concept, and partly because of the hasty nature of development and deployment. In the late 1990s, an expert panel warned of a pattern of deficiencies in American BMD programmes, driven by perceived urgency to achieve “early capability”. These findings do seem to have influenced a number of American BMD programmes, which have proceeded in a more systematic and satisfactory manner over the intervening two decades. But GMD, the showcase system for US defence, has not. The Pentagon’s own in-house authority on testing and evaluation has slammed GMD for its unreliability, potential vulnerability to attack or disruption, and an insufficient network of radars. A report issued by the Union of Concerned Scientists last year depicted a programme operating under minimal oversight from Congress, at great expense, and with disappointing results. Most of the rest of the world’s existing BMD systems belong to a third category: terminal-phase defences. America’s Patriot and Aegis systems and its Russian and Chinese counterparts, as well as Israel’s Arrow system, THAAD, all involve interceptor missiles designed to catch attacking missiles as they descend through the atmosphere toward a target. (THAAD has some ability to intercept above the atmosphere.) The test records of this class of defences have become increasingly impressive. Patriot, THAAD, and Aegis are precisely the defences that would be employed against North Korean missile attacks in the region. But by virtue of being terminal-phase defences, they protect relatively small areas, close to their own locations. Patriot is often classified as a “point defence”, and used to protect military bases. THAAD is an “area defence” with a longer reach; the US has deployed a THAAD unit to cover its Pacific island of Guam, and another to protect the southern half of South Korea, both of which play host to a number of important American military facilities. Aegis, which is primarily a sea-based system, differs by virtue of its high degree of mobility. Patriot and THAAD can move by road or by transport aircraft if needed, but Aegis-equipped vessels sail around the region at all times. South Korea’s Aegis boats are equipped with SM-2 terminal-phase interceptors; their Japanese and American equivalents also carry SM-3 mid-course interceptors, enabling a “regional defence”. Analysis What are Donald Trump's options for solving the North Korea crisis? De-escalating Kim Jong-un’s nuclear threat – through force, sanctions or talks – will require the US to navigate its tricky relationship with China Read more So why didn’t an American or Japanese SM-3 take a shot at the North Korean missile that passed over Japan last week? There are two main possibilities. One possibility is that no Aegis vessel was in any position to stop the missile. When it sailed over the island nation, the missile was well into space, about 500km high. The second possibility is that there was simply no reason to make an attempt. By this point, it would have been clear to Japanese and American radar operators that the missile was headed for somewhere in the Pacific, over 1,000km beyond Japan. In short, it’s not always possible to defend empty reaches of the ocean, and it’s not really desirable to try, either. Until there is an actual war, of course, we can’t know how effective they would be. BMD is not a panacea. Even the best systems must break at some point, faced with multiple salvos of missiles, attacks on different trajectories, manoeuvring warheads and other advanced technologies, and limited numbers of interceptors. Against an increasingly capable opponent like North Korea, it is possible that defences would only buy some time for the US military and its allies at the start of an immensely destructive war. • Joshua Pollack is the editor of the Nonproliferation Review and a senior research associate at Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California -- Peace Is Doable -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. 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